Chapter One: First, the End…
This is my father’s story. When he was twelve years old, he was held accountable for the death of his sister. Her death haunted his life. As did the premature death of his father. As did the execution of his brother for murder. As did far lesser but countless misfortunes, many of them his own doing. His turbulent life undid him. His story also became my mother’s, and then mine. So, it is my story, too. And telling it keeps a promise my father would have wanted me to make to himself and to me that I never dared to make, until now.
I know more about my father than he might have known about himself. More than his own mother knew about him, given what she refused to believe. And certainly more than my mother did, even though she may have known things I will never know. I know what I know, and yet I wonder if I know anything at all worth knowing. I see a string of details stretching from the beginning of his life to its end. A string of twists and kinks and knots that mark places where my memory intersects with something he did—usually to or with me. Or when he and my mother were together. Or someplace he was—at least he told me he was there. Or someone he knew—or said he knew.
Of all these times, I should be most sure about the times we were together. Now, only a few months older than my father was when he died, I hold some of my memories of him so tightly that I may have crushed their truthfulness. Others I have abandoned so deliberately that I now discover great gaps in my childhood or in the times I shared with him after that—replaced with shrugs or sighs, or worse yet, invented stories that were so absurd that I was probably pitied for telling them. But of all that I can tell about my father, the stories that he told me about himself are by far the most fabulous. If they are not true , at least he wanted them to be. He needed those imagined details that held his life within focus – even if that focus was his own making. Despite all that, I know that he wanted so see himself clearly. And so have I.
To tell his story I must begin when and where his life ended—in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital of San Antonio, Texas. Severe cardiac arrest. All resuscitation efforts, including massage futile. Time of death: 2:14 p.m. Date: March 27, 1979. Telephoning me with the information, courteously, ever-so gingerly, was Ms. Zilleriatis—she said “Mzzz”, for emphasis, stretching it over into the first letter of her last name. She explained that it was her job to call next-of-kin in a medical emergency. She already had telephoned my mother in California, but at that point could only report that my father was dangerously ill. To me, little more than a half an hour later, she said, “I am so sorry to have to tell you that your father has passed away in the Veteran’s Hospital in San Antonio, Texas”. No pause. No eagerness to hear what my response would be.
Has she heard too many such responses already? Is she trained to speak in this rhythm, in itself soothing because each phrase is so straight-forward, until one hangs up and begins to think about what has just been said? How many times has she done this already today, it being in the late afternoon in New York and two hours earlier in Texas? Most likely mine was not her first call of the day. Does the smoothness and the evenness, the slowness and the slightly perfumed quality of her voice result from fatigue? from boredom? from indifference? Is it an accumulated reservoir of experience, her way to control of her own remorse? Has her father died? Did she have happy memories of him? Was her childhood a series of entries and exits of a father whose whole life was turbulent, an accidental combination of bad luck and bad judgment, an unraveling of good will until it was too late, as was mine? I thought all these questions in an instant, my mind unable to focus on the fact of what she told me.
“Please help me learn the family’s wishes about your father’s last rites,” I heard her say. “Are you able to travel to San Antonio to receive his personal effects? There seems to be an automobile in the parking lot of the hospital? I understand there is no family member in this area.”
She probably said more, too, but I cannot remember it now. All I remember saying was, “Yes, I’ll come to San Antonio as soon as possible.”
I called my mother in California. She sounded calm, even relieved. “Yes, dear.” She said to each of my statements. I shook my head when the phone was back in its cradle.
After a few deep breaths, I called my father’s youngest brother, my uncle, a pipe-fitter in Philadelphia. He said he would call me back when I knew more about my plans. I called my father’s younger sister, my aunt, in New York City. She began to cry and hung up while I was still talking.
Early the next morning, while a glowing sunrise filled my old Plymouth with a tangible light, I drove some sixty miles north to Montreal, the nearest major airport to my home, close to the Canadian border in New York State. I must have done other things between the calls and arriving in the airport, but I remember none of them, or even getting on the plane.
I remember only one incident during the plane ride (actually rides, because I had to change planes in Chicago, and again, I think, in St. Louis, or was it Kansas City?) Somewhere on the trip I sat next to a soldier who was going home to San Antonio from basic training. I don’t know how the conversation turned to tomatoes, but I remember him saying that the first thing he was going to do when he got home was go into his family’s back yard garden and pick a ripe tomato. I told him that I could not plant my garden and grow any tomatoes until early June. When he asked why I was going to San Antonio, I said, my father had just died there. He said, taking a single breath, “Oh. Sorry. What kind of tomatoes do you grow? You can’t beat a ripe Beefsteak.”
The plane landed unmemorably. The taxi ride to the hospital was equally unmemorable, aside from the driver’s cool assumption that I was going to visit someone there. “Yes,” I said, “I was going to visit someone….” Hearing myself say that, I decided I wasn’t yet ready to correct myself out-loud. Somehow the conversation about the tomatoes in the airplane had persuaded me that others would rather not hear more.
“This is it my friend,” I heard, as the taxi pulled over to the curb. I remember telling the driver to keep the change, however much it was, and I heard the car door close behind me. I remember feeling the heat rise from the sidewalk, a sharp a contrast with the March mornings promising Spring in upstate New York. The black electrical tape I had used to mend my little suitcase’s broken handle was already sticky in my palm. The cab pulled away and into the traffic behind me as I walked toward the main entrance of the hospital. My ears were still plugged from the plane ride. I felt queasy, as though I had swallowed cold grease.
Inside the lobby, the directory that informed me that “Details” (Adams, Hodgkins, Hopper, Johannson, Reimers, Zilleriatis)—ah, so that’s her name, I thought…and why do I still, after nearly forty years, remember those other names?—was in Room C. A sign told me to “Follow the Yellow Line.” On the gray tiled floor were several colored lines. Most turned left toward a hallway. The yellow line went to the left only for a few feet and then turned right, down another hallway by itself. At the end of that hall was a frosted glass partition, on which was lettered in black, Room C, and a heavy-looking, black door.
I was deceived by the narrowness of the hallway and expected Room C to be only twice or so as wide. Instead, I entered a large room. It seemed to be another section of the Montreal Airport I had left some six hours before, only with desks instead of long rows of chrome and black plastic chairs. Someone had grouped the desks into an arrangement whose logic I could not understand from the doorway; they all looked alike and seemed to be evenly distributed in groups of six or eight throughout the room. To distinguish between the groups, though, cardboard posters hung from the ceiling on wires.
When I looked to my left, I saw a hanging sign in the far corner that read “Details” and headed for that section, without noticing any of the other signs or persons at the desks. The only sound I remember was that of ringing telephones. In my memory, the whole room is strangely unpopulated—only me, and the woman far ahead of me, at the desk under the sign that read “Details.” And now I even have forgotten her face. The only face I remember during the entire trip to San Antonio, including my walk across Room C, was the soldier’s on the plane. I even can still hear him say “Beefsteak” in his Texas drawl.
I had talked with Ms. Zilleriatis on the afternoon before without asking myself what she might look like. I used to guess what an unseen person looked like from the sound of his or her voice on the telephone. It was a game I liked to play, if only for the wild surprises I usually received. Now, in my seventies, I’ve given up trying to learn any clues from the unknown voices that I hear on the phone, part of a belated, desperate effort to convince myself that all people, including myself, given the densely woven tapestries of our lives, are beyond my or anyone else’s imagining. In any case, it was unlikely that I would have guessed that the person who had such an insistent, business-like but still soft voice on the phone would have deep-orange dyed hair and be wearing a fluffy black mohair–like sweater that reminded me against my will of a Halloween pumpkin. I wanted to laugh. I almost forgot why I was there.
My mouth was dry when I tried to speak and my voice sounded muffled, breaking in tone as it had not done since I was a fourteen-year-old. It was difficult for me to even say my name. Instead, I heard myself say my father’s name, “Herschel, Herschel Susskind.” The woman’s bright orange mouth began to speak. I recovered in time to say, “I am his son. You telephoned me yesterday.”
She may have liked to play the same telephone guessing-game too. Maybe it was just my imagination, but her hesitant smile seemed to be more out of amusement than courtesy. Then she looked down at some papers on her desk, picked up the telephone, and held the receiver away from her head without dialing. When she looked up at me again, she said very softly, “Yes, Mr. Susskind. Thank you very much for coming so soon. Of course, I am sorry.” I think she motioned me to sit down and then completed her intention to dial. I heard her say, “Dr. Miranda, would you please come to the ‘Details desk”. Mr. Susskind is here. You told me to call when he arrived.”
She put the phone back in its cradle without looking at it or me, took a sheet of paper out of a folder on her desk, and began checking the information about my father’s case. It was then that I began to see the appropriateness of the term “Details”.
“Please confirm this information for our records,” she said, and then read, in a rather soothing monotone, the facts from my father’s life which apparently were most interesting or important to the Veteran’s Administration: “Herschel Susskind, no middle name or initial. Date of Birth: October 25, 1908. Religion: Jewish. Parents surviving: None. Married. Dora, nee Fisch. One child, David.” She looked up briefly at me, holding her place on the form with the eraser on her pencil. I nodded. “Wife and child both notified of the deceased’s demise.” She looked up at me again and smiled.
At this point we were interrupted by a young, balding, very muscular man. Without my asking, he introduced himself as the attending physician at my father’s death. “I am Dr.Miranda.” Without waiting for me to say anything, he continued, in an unexpectedly high, staccato voice, “Your father, Mr. Susskind, was very agitated on the morning of his death, I am sorry to tell you. Very irritable and angry.” Dr. Miranda gestured with his fist. “Primarily at members of the hospital staff. He had been told that he was dismissed, and was told he could leave during the course of the morning. That he should pick up his belongings. He didn’t want to leave. He kept saying that he was a very, very ill man.”
I could not resist saying, “He seems to have been correct, Dr. Miranda.”
“You don’t quite understand, Mr. Susskind,” he said, trying to disguise his irritation with my comment. “Your father was admitted to the hospital two weeks earlier because of his complaint of chest pains and because of his history of treatment at other VA hospitals for heart problems. As you know, he had several minor heart seizures and was on medication for his hardening arteries. We now know he had a very advanced case of artherosclerosis. At one point he said he had been refused a by-pass operation at the VA hospital in San Diego because he had such weak arteries. This also is correct.”
“Why was he being released, then?” I asked.
“After his admission to this hospital, he got the full range of tests and procedures for his complaint. No emergency situation was found. Nothing that we believed was indicative of a hospitalization for a heart condition. A colleague told him this a few hours after he checked in, two weeks ago. He found our diagnosis very troubling. I’ve just reviewed his chart. It tells me that he became angry and abusive to the staff, and had to be sedated. He was then placed in our psychiatric ward, allowed to rest, given meals, a hair-cut, a chance to clean himself up a bit, regain his strength. He was rather frail and hungry when he arrived, I think. The ward nurse reports tell me that he calmed down. He spent his time reading, and especially playing cards. He seemed to like to gamble a great deal. Two weeks later, the night before he died, I know he lost all the daily-allotment spending money he received—we give the patients each 90 cents a day—to buy toothpaste, cigarettes, whatever they might want. Your father lost about $15 in a card game. That’s what he said when he got so angry with me the next morning, yesterday. He had lost all his money playing cards.”
I had to think about my father’s scam of VA hospitals when he was driving across the country. He would drive as far as he could, zig-zagging from one VA to another. When he ran out of gas, or wanted a place to stay if the weather turned rough, he would check into the nearest one, and save up his daily spending money. Before too long, he would hustle up a card game among the other patients. If he was lucky, he might win enough to pay for the entire trip to wherever he was planning to go. If not, he would simply try again further down the road.
Now I knew at least one reason why my father had become so angry on the morning of his death. He was being forced to leave the hospital and he had no money to buy gas. Another reason, no doubt, was his festering disappointment when I told him he could not stay with my wife and me, the last time we saw each other, less than a month before. I can still see him turning out of our driveway toward the Interstate. He had headed south, hoping to stay with his brother and sister–in-law in Florida. When she told him she had her hands full with my uncle, who was dying of cancer, my father started driving back to California. That took him into Texas, when he checked into the San Antonio VA, and died. Unwanted by me. By his family. By “everyone on the planet,” I could hear him say.
While I was thinking this, Dr. Miranda went on. “We cannot give up hospital space to rehabilitate distressed or unhappy veterans like your father. His condition was not so threatening or traumatic that he required further in-patent attention. The psychiatric report found him capable of controlling his temper, of rational judgment, although it does mention his great anger against a great many things and persons in life.”
I thought he was talking about me, and looked away, toward the door where I had come in. “My father was a turbulent man, Dr. Miranda.”
“Yes,” he continued. “I can see that he was turbulent. He was angry, as I say, especially at the Veteran’s Administration, as you probably know, with which he seems to have some long standing feud about the status of his disability. At any event, we could not keep him as an in-patient. We did offer him out-patient services.”
I could not help but wonder at this point if Dr. Miranda took this much time with the relatives of all the other deceased patients. Was my father finally getting the special attention he had sought so desperately during his life?
“Your father,” he continued, looking across the desk at Ms. Zilleriatis instead of at me, “your father….” His long pause made me think I was supposed to say something. But I didn’t know what. Dr. Miranda finally continued, “…suffered his fatal heart attack outside the third floor elevator, shouting at another doctor and me, and insisting that he not be released. We rushed him immediately to the ICU, tried to resuscitate him, ultimately performed open-chest heart massage. I could not avoid noticing his unusually advanced atherosclerosis. We tried to revive him, Mr. Susskind, but after twenty minutes, we had to conclude that he had expired. He was unconscious within seconds of his attack, and probably suffered very little. I do regret that there was nothing more we could do.” Dr. Miranda then turned his head to look expectantly at me.
I remember saying “thank you” three or four times. It was easier for me to believe that he had done what he thought was best or proper under the circumstances. There was so much more that he could not have known about my father. We shook hands, I think, and he left. Nothing was going to change the fact that my father was dead.
Ms. Zilleriatis continued confirming her information with me, although I cannot remember what she asked me from then onward to the end of the form. When she put her pen down, she turned to me and, in a very soft voice that made me lean forward to hear her, said, “Do you want to see your father’s body?”
I was startled by the finality of her question. Without waiting an instant, I said, “No, I want to remember him as I last saw him, thank you.”
She paused, took a slow breath, and asked me again. Again I said, “No”.
On the subject of providing a funeral service and burial for my father, I said that it was my mother’s and my wish that he be buried in California. My mother told me some months before that she and my father had discussed the matter, that he could be buried in a military cemetery at the government’s expense. Ms. Zilleriatis then telephoned a local mortuary, said something briefly and put the telephone receiver in my hand. I remember telling someone that I wanted to have my father’s body sent to San Diego, and buried in a military cemetery near there, if possible. The nearest open cemetery turned out to be Riverside, and I said that was fine. The voice on the phone asked me if my father had any special wishes about his burial. I really didn’t know. I knew my mother had told me the day before that he should be cremated in Texas, and that she preferred to not come to any ceremony.
When I told my uncle, though, the night before I flew to San Antonio about my father’s death, he said he was against cremation. “You know, Jews don’t believe in cremation,” he said.
I remember thinking about the Nazi death and slave labor camps. “Yes, I know.”
Cremation would have surely been simpler in my father’s case. Easier for my mother, quicker, less stressful. But I said to the mortician that he should not be cremated. I would travel to California and arrange for the memorial service there. He then told me the name and address of a funeral director who would handle the California arrangements once the body arrived there.
“One final question, please, Mr. Susskind,” he said. “Has your father a dignified suit, shirt and neck-tie in which we may dress him?”
I remember being quite stunned by the question, and then by the mortician’s accent. It was the same as the soldier’s on the plane.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Please dress him in the clothes he wore when he checked into the hospital. I assume the casket will be closed any way.”
After I hung up the receiver, I asked Ms. Zilleriatis if she knew what clothes my father had worn on the day he checked in. She found a form and read: “orange cotton polo shirt; green knit, polyester, checkered trousers, stained on left leg; deer-skin house-slippers; t-shirt, boxer shorts; brown socks.”
I tried not to smile at the thought. My father was wearing the same clothes when I last saw him, six weeks before, a bitter cold February day, as he left my home and drove toward Florida. He had refused to take a coat, saying he soon would be warm enough. My mother never knew that he was buried in that orange shirt and checkered trousers. She would be mortified if she did.
Ms. Zilleriatis then gave me a small, clear plastic bag with my father’s personal effects. It contained a partial dental plate. Did he have a second one, or was he being buried without his false teeth? He was ashamed of being seen without them, and only a few times made a joke out of wearing them by suddenly taking them out and trying to whistle. In the plastic bag, too, were his wedding ring, a small picket magnifying glass that he called his “loop,” carried to inspect gemstones and jewelry that happened to come in his way, a plastic comb, his wallet (no money, just business cards, his own and others, his driver’s license, several photographs, mostly of me, one of my mother, one of his mother; and a plastic calendar, 1979), a key ring with car keys and others on it, two unopened packs of chewing gum, and ninety-three cents in change. That was it. His “valuables.” Seventy years on the planet in a small, plastic bag.
Ms. Zilleriatis must have read the look on my face when she said, “I am very sorry, Mr. Susskind. That is all there is. I’ll send his clothes on to the mortuary.”
I was not expecting a treasure or a bank book or anything valuable, mind you. All I could think of was that my father’s whole life—his intense pride, his obsessive determination to be special, to be important and famous—everything that made him my father was also in that bag. According to him, the best proof of a life that had accomplished all the goals it had set itself was conspicuous, massive material wealth. And now my father was dead, passing on to me his “ninety-three cents in change.” How would he have tried to explain this to me?
He would have begun with one of his favorite words—“irregardless.” The contradiction of the word never worried him. I think I told him sometime before I left California for college that it was not a word. He still used it in almost every moment of self-reflection, few as they were. Maybe the word even consoled him, since his own life contained so many contradictions. I can still hear him roll it out in defense of something he did or wanted to do, or to refute an argument whose logic he found uncomfortable.
“Irregardless,” he would say. “I don’t believe it.” Any attempt to persuade him of a different truth would be in vain.
I don’t remember saying anything more to Ms. Zilleriatis, except “Thank you”.
She told me where the parking lot was where I would find my father’s car. Within a minute or two I was standing in the hot, sticky San Antonio afternoon, beside my father’s ten year old dark-green Mercedes. Inside, through the dusty windows, I could see a jumble of clothes and magazines, newspapers, a map, and the molding remains of a loaf of WonderBread. When I opened the door, a blast of heat struck me, but not nearly as powerfully as the odor that came with it. It was the smell, the unique, undeniable, unforgettable, memory-bound odor of my father. It was as though his actual spirit had just been released from the car, his car, his beloved Mercedes, his real home for the last hundred thousand of its 200,500 plus miles. This old Mercedes was the symbol of all the success he had promised himself during all the days I had known him, and surely before.
I put the map up on the passenger seat. I remember that especially because it forced me to put my head and hands inside the car, and exposed me completely to my father’s lingering presence. It suddenly struck me in a different way than it had before that he was dead.
Over the last twenty years, I saw my father no more than ten times, altogether a few months, certainly not more. Before I left home in Los Angeles for college, he was away even more than that. During the war, when I was, maybe, three, I have a memory of seeing him once through the round window of the hospital ward door where I spent weeks at a time being treated for eczema and for asthma. I know now that it couldn’t have been him. It must have another sailor.
My father came home after the war in the Pacific was over. I remember another party, and my happiness that he would be there. And around that time, he brought me a sailor suit like his. An old photograph shows me with coal tar smeared on my face and hands, the then current remedy for my eczema, saluting him. I look like I have been playing in mud, with dark patches on my otherwise white skin. My hair is slicked back, and probably still very blond and straight. The small, crinkle-edge, tattered and creased, black and white photograph is shot through with odd-shaped shadows, including my father’s, cast on the ground toward me as he took my picture. That day I believe also was the occasion of the promised but unfulfilled pony ride, my most haunting, painful childhood memory.
Because my father had abandoned my mother and me when he enlisted in the navy in December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, my mother divorced him within the next year. She took me, just six months old then, in a laundry basket on the train back to Los Angeles and moved in with her parents, where we lived during the bulk of my childhood. My grandparents’ downstairs apartment, a converted storefront which had served as my grandfather’s shoemaker shop while he was still well enough to work his trade, is the “home” I remember most. I don’t think my father ever lived there with us, but I might be wrong. I have a memory of me sitting on the toilet seat, my feet not touching the floor, watching him wash his curly, jet-black hair, and then towel it dry. I see his face in the mirror, lathered up to shave, and notice the care he took around his pencil-thin mustache. I hear him say, “What are you looking at, Butch?” His eyes twinkled and he went on with his humming.
After the war, and over the next thirteen years, my father and my mother married and divorced each other two more times. All together, they were married to each other four times and divorced three. My mother was considering divorcing him again at the time of his death. Never while I was still at home were my parents together for more than a year at a stretch. My father’s absences were much longer than that. Once I think I did not see him for four years. That was the time my uncle said he was in jail.
What I remember most about the time he was away was that I missed him terribly. I invented stories for my friends that my father was still in the navy, or spying against the Russians, or training to be a space pilot, or exploring in Africa. These lies probably were compensation for the hostile stories which my grandparents and my uncles told me about my father: that he was in jail—perhaps true ; that he would not come back—but he always did, and I don’t believe I ever doubted that he would; or that I would someday have a different, better father—my mother never considered anyone else, as far as I know.
Well, my mother did flirt with other men, at least that’s what I think now, looking back on how she acted when she talked with one of my gym teachers or the leader of my Woodcraft Rangers group. But she never married anyone else. She was enthralled by my father, entangled in a love-hate relationship with him that seems to me now like the two little Scotty dog magnets I played with: the little black dog and the little white dog pulled each other close and held each other tight, until I turned them around, and then they pushed each other away with just as much force.
When my father did appear—usually without warning, announced only by a phone call from the bus station or the toot of the horn of his old Essex, I was ecstatic, even if it meant that my mother and I went with him to a motel room, a movie, or simply drove to Sycamore Park for an afternoon. During those visits I remember saying over and over again that I didn’t want him to go away, that he and my mother should be friends, or that they should kiss each other. I even remember seeing my mother and my father kiss one time—I think I was six. It must have been a long and passionate kiss, because I thought it so strange that my mother would stand on one leg and bend her other leg back at the knee. I ran up to them and, not even reaching their waist, held my arms around them as tight as I could,. My father looked down at me and laughed a long time.
And now, in a hospital parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, I realized that his physical presence, his odor, his very thick, white, wavy hair, his high forehead, his dark grey-brown eyes, his exceptionally well-manicured, long and very graceful fingers, his very lean-feeling, solid shoulders and arms, and all the other “things” about him were gone. I was suddenly struck as well by the realization that another dimension was gone, too: his laughter; his voice; his singing “Mammy” like Al Jolson did; his off-color jokes; his attempts at sarcasm; his determination to show others; especially me, that he knew more than the “so-called experts” and others whom he felt had an unfair advantage over him; his quick temper; his sense of pride in himself as a smooth-talking jewelry salesman; his unwillingness to accept responsibility; his bitterness, his impatience with others; his nervousness; his ambitions and his obvious frustrations at not achieving them—all the characteristics that he had displayed with such consistency, such damnable consistently throughout his life, were also gone.
Only then, when I myself was thirty-eight years old—hard to believe, now, but it was for the first time in my life—did I fully understand that dying means ceasing to exist, however banal that may sound. And more, in the case of my father, whose life seemed to flow from a river into a trickle, instead of the other way, I was probably the only person in the world who would remember him to any degree at all. I also then understood for the first time that what I could remember about him would itself someday disappear, too. Disappear forever. His body was already decaying. Someday mine would, too. His life was a string of unfulfilled hopes for success. And mine?
